In a recent issue in the Medical Post — and my thanks to Sun medical reporter Pamela Fayerman for alerting me to it — one article throws light on a dark chapter in the life of Tommy Douglas, the so-called father of universal health care. As the embodiment of our belief in social welfare, Douglas was once voted as the Greatest Canadian in a CBC poll.

But about that dark chapter: The Post article was about Douglas’s belief in eugenics.

He believed in the forced segregation and sterilization of what he considered “subnormal” people — those who were morally or genetically deficient, as decided upon by the state. In his 1933 masters thesis, The Problems of the Subnormal Family, he charted the lives of a dozen “immoral” and “non-moral” women and their 200 descendants in his hometown of Weyburn, Sask.

To Douglas, they were those “whose mental rating is low, i.e. anywhere from high-grade moron to mentally defective,” “whose moral standards are below normal,” who were “subject to social disease,” or who were “so improvident as to be a public charge.” (I think I qualify in at least two of those categories.)

His plan to erase this stain on the genetic pool?

He recommended: (a) the “improvement of marriage laws,” which would certify a couple’s fitness to procreate; (b) the “segregation” of the subnormal populace (that is, forced incarceration and institutionalization); and (c), the state-sanctioned sterilization of the genetically and intellectually “defective.”

“It is surely,” Douglas wrote, “the duty of the state to meet this problem.”

Did his early belief in the state control of eugenics later inform his greater concept of a state-controlled universal health care system?

Some history: In 1935, only two years after writing his thesis, Douglas was elected to the House of Commons. He went on to become premier of Saskatchewan, and would introduce North America’s first universal health care program, which would act as a model for Canada’s medicare system. In time, what public knowledge there was of his thesis faded in the light of his political career.

His defenders insist Douglas rejected eugenics soon after writing his thesis. He was said to have had a change of heart after a trip to prewar Germany, where the Nazis hoped to manufacture a “master race.” As an ambassador to a World Youth Congress in 1936, Douglas wrote he experienced a”frightful” epiphany after attending one of Adolf Hitler’s mass rallies.

To me, the connection between a Nazi rally and his disavowal of eugenics seems a stretch. But to his credit, Douglas, as premier, refused to enact any eugenic laws, despite two official reviews of the province’s mental health system advising him to do so. Instead, he installed vocational training and therapy programs.

But after all these years, Douglas’s early embrace of eugenics has become a talking point. What did it say about his thoughts on the powers of government, and about public versus private health care?

In a 2012 essay in The Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, Dr. Michael Shevell, head pediatrician at Montreal Children’s Hospital, wrote that Douglas’s eugenic episode should act as a warning, that even the best of intentions can lead us down the wrong path. But as an admirer of Douglas and medicare, Shevell wrote, he thought it would be “self-defeating” for the nation to taint Medicare’s qualities of compassion and equality by “lapsed judgments” — even by someone like Douglas.

Dr. Brian Day, whose constitutional challenge to legalize private health care is now being considered by the B.C. Supreme Court, offers a different view. In an interview Monday, Day said that Douglas’s early flirtation with eugenics epitomized his over-arching conviction in the power of the state to determine what’s best for the individual.

“It’s a disdain for the rights of the individual to make choices for himself,” Day said. “I think it grew out of his belief in government’s role is to rule, not to serve … It was only after he became a politician that he distanced himself from (eugenics). He didn’t distance himself from it until he thought it might be politically inappropriate, that’s my view.

“I don’t dislike Tommy Douglas. But I would point out that Tommy Douglas never intended to outlaw private health insurance. He never intended to eliminate user fees.”

What Tommy Douglas believed, or what he would think of public health care today, must remain conjecture. He died in 1986. What is certain, though, was while he theorized about eugenics, it came to be a reality in 24 U.S. states and in B.C. and Alberta.

Both provinces enacted forced sterilization laws — Alberta in 1928 and B.C. in 1933. More than 2,800 people in Alberta were sterilized without their consent, while an estimated 330 people had the surgery in B.C. It was only in 1972 that Alberta repealed its eugenics law, with B.C. following suit in 1973.

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